San Bernardino Alle Ossa

There are mounds of human skeletons on display in the bustling heart of Milan - but do we still value the macabre nowadays?

They keep old bones at the Ossuary of San Bernardino in Milan. It’s said that they came from the martyred remains of Catholics killed during an invasion by Goths in the 4^th century, but it’s also possible they were gathered in the aftermath of a terrible plague which swept the city in the 1700s. It’s tempting to believe in the martyrdom story because it implies that all this death had a reason or an ideology to endorse it - but the plague explanation is probably more likely - and it’s hard to think of another reason how so many people came to die so quickly in the same place, leaving their bones available to decorate the walls and ceiling of a small but elaborate chapel.

Skulls are heaped from floor to ceiling in a meshwork of complex, intricate patterns - most are honey-gold with age, but some are streaked with chocolate brown and hashed with the shadows of mesh like books in a latticework dresser. High up on the walls and overlaying raucous rococo frescoes, bones are organised in playful patterns which imitate heraldic motifs; coats of arms are made from arms and the scrollwork overlaid with ribs and fingers and a seemingly endless supply of gawping, passive skulls.

Look closely and you’ll see that most of the skulls have been lacquered with something softly glossy - and there’s even the ripple of bristles from a brush’s slapped application. Perhaps the treatment’s holding these bones together, because elsewhere at the porous heels of humeri, the impression is more like pumice or dissipating flour. Maybe that mesh keeps the skulls from crumbling into the room, but it also blocks the temptation to reach and touch these strangely tactile things. That said, in one corner, somebody has worked out how to push things through the wire and in amongst the bones. There is a single skull which has rose petals for eyes, and the twist of a receipt where teeth once grinned.

In my book on ossuaries, there is an explanation of how skeletons were cleaned and bleached in the sun before they were put to work again as decorations. There’s even a photograph of a broad, sandy yard in Spain that is heaped with limbs like cords of wood, and the knuckles splayed like knots and turns of fibre. It was taken in Castilla y León, and it also shows living men who patiently bleach each bone by turning it to face the sun.

But of course it goes without saying that ossuaries are yesterday’s news - San Bernardino alle Ossa is almost hidden on the edge of a piazza that is dominated by a much finer and more impressive building. Both stand within a short bone’s throw of the Duomo itself, but this side chapel is less than an eddy beneath the heavy, fashionable streets of Milan, where acreages of shining glass are devoted the exposure of little bags and feathery shoes which probably aren’t for sale to the likes of you and I.

Even inside the church itself, there’s only a small A4 sign which points towards a side chapel down a narrow passage. The ossuary is not hiding, but it’s hardly holding pride of place. And I hear that in many places where these old monuments are found across Spain and France and the Balkan states, local people sometimes feel a sense of slight embarrassment at the morbid extravagance of previous generations. There’s no great desire to talk about these places or sell T-shirts which say “I HEART SAN BERNARDINO ALLE OSSA” - but they can’t be deleted or done away with either. Perhaps there are moves to close them down and “move with the times”, but this is balanced against a very pressing awareness that these are real bones and the bodies of human beings who lived and breathed and walked these streets. They have to be taken seriously.

I sat on my own to sketch for an hour in the ossuary, then a man of my own age came in with his camera. He took some photographs, then he asked me a question in Italian. I replied in broken tones that he should repeat himself slowly so that I had a chance of understanding, but he sidestepped the request and tried again in English. “The small skulls”, he said. “Are they from children?” Part of me wanted to laugh and say “I don’t know mate, I’m so far off piste here that I could hardly tell you down from up”. But of course they were from children, and I said they probably were. Because how else could you explain why some skulls were half the size of others, and the hollows where their teeth had been like crayons stabbed in mud then long since dried?

And I was so far off piste because death in Scotland has sometimes felt like a steady envelopment of darkness - it’s all too easy for a man to lean away his from life in silent isolation. In a match of grim fatality, none can trump us, but it bothers me how Lorca wrote that “a man who is dead in Spain is more dead than a man who is dead in any other country” – he was writing about Granada, but the same morbid vitality runs around the Mediterranean like a scorch of lightning, and even the relentless descent into death is somehow clawed back for a final moment’s glory.

We might claim we’d never have such an ossuary in Scotland, but we can’t ignore the history book’s insistence that bones were found to have been arranged on shelves at Skara Brae, and countless tombs and chambered cairns from Galloway to Shetland held compartments of skulls and ribs and scapulae, all retained for generations at the hearth. There’s a desire to do this in all of us, and there’s nothing to fear in the proximity of death.

You could guess that San Bernardino alle Ossa is a reminder of life’s brevity - and if we can’t even be sure when these people died, there’s no specific sadness beyond a wider and more selfish reminder that death is coming for us too. It’s tempting to look at this place and be frightened of it - or to recoil from the literal presence of decay and decline. Our ancestors made sense of death by bringing it closer - and perhaps if the tables were turned and they were allowed to watch a modern funeral play out, they’d call us the stranger ones - disgusted by the chilling knack we have for screwing long-loved bodies into boxes and plunging them into furnaces or the ground, then simply going home.

First published Bog Myrtle and Peat - February 2024